With the new regional museum of contemporary art (FRAC) in Dunkirk, architects Lacaton & Vassal have created a new cultural and social hub on the edge of the sea. The building incorporates the vast volume of the former AP2 dockyard hall, with all its potential for new and unexpected uses. Whereas its permeable outer skin puts users in close contact with the climate outside, its generous yet flexible internal spaces foster social encounter and form an impressive setting for the works of art on display.

By Karine Dana
Photography by Brendan Austin

East elevation of the new FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais in Dunkirk. The new volume (on the right) duplicates the existing AP2 shipyard hall, thus creating vast amounts of space with potential for future, as yet unforeseen, uses.

“The building allows us to come into contact with a
completely new target group that is enthusiastic about
architecture. In this way, it expands the range of tasks
we once had to perform. In the meantime, we have
started to offer special architectural guided tours
during which the depot rooms are viewed as well.
The moment people consider the building from the
viewpoint of architecture, they begin to fully identify
with it.”

Adèle Frémolle, Deputy Director

When the municipalities association
of Dunkirk decided to move the Fonds
Régional d’Art Contemporain (FRAC)
Nord-Pas de Calais to the AP2 factory
hall, it wanted to have the former shipyard
building converted for the new use.
However, architects Lacaton & Vassal
won the competition in 2009 with a radically
different proposal. Instead of filling
the hall with museum spaces and mutilating
it in the process, they decided to
leave the historic industrial monument
empty and to place a new building of the
same size − 25 metres wide, 35 metres
high and 70 metres long − at its side. This
decision had certain advantages, not only
functionally but in terms of space as well.
It also challenges the expediency of an urban
planning policy that is all too often
destructive in its approach to industrial
heritage. The FRAC is almost directly next to
the sea and, at the same time, at the outermost
edge of the urban development
area ‘ZAC du Grand Large’ in Dunkirk.
The latter is a component of the Neptun
project initiated in the 1990s with which
the city of Dunkirk wants to create closer
ties between the former industrial harbour
and the urban municipality. In the
harbour, nearly all the industrial installations
have disappeared in the last few
years. Only the AP2 hall has been retained
as a last relic of the French ship-building
industry. The huge industrial building, with its
steel and reinforced concrete skeleton,
appears as if it had been stranded on the
outskirts of a new residential district.
When the museum opened in 2013, the
break between the FRAC and the AP2
hall, and the rest of the urban renewal
district was particularly noticeable. The
immediate surroundings still consisted
of vast tracts of empty land, and it took
some time for local residents to identify
themselves with the twin building and its
huge dimensions. In the following years,
however, the cultural institution gradually
coalesced with the urban landscape
and new uses for the building eventually
became established. With their design,
the architects have created the preconditions
for a wide range of different social
and cultural uses. Now, it is up to the FRAC
team to exploit this potential over time by
designing an appropriate programme for
the museum.
The potential of empty space
By doubling, as it were, the existing building,
the architects give visitors and FRAC
employees a dual opportunity to experience
art and architecture in a new way;
on the one hand, through the confrontation
of an artistic programme with an
enormous empty space and, on the other,
through the reactivation of a piece of industrial
architecture that makes it possible
to escape from the conformity of the
surrounding new buildings. Although
the two structures are the property of
the higher-level municipalities association,
the AP2 hall will be used by the city
sooner or later. Together with the management
of the FRAC, the city administration
is already working on plans and
financing for the future use of the hall,
which is to include exhibitions, concerts,
sports and diverse other events. At the
moment, visitors to the museum still
have to content themselves with looking
through a large glass window at the old
industrial hall, which, for the people of
Dunkirk, symbolises a history that is as
illustrious as it is painful.

Daylight floods the access areas
of the new building even on a dull
day. The extremely lightweight and
transparent facades consist of a
double layer of ETFE foil stretched
over a steel skeleton.

“In the exhibitions, the sea is ubiquitous. This alters the
way in which a museum visit takes place and also
changes our relationship to everyday work. I can no
longer detach myself from it.”

Élodie Condette, programme manager

In contrast to conventional museums,
the FRAC has the task of building up a
fund of contemporary art in the French
regions and making it accessible to as
wide a public as possible. As if they
wanted to emphasise this opening gesture,
the architects gave their new building
three entrances. The staff have their
own entrance in the north. Visitors enter
the ground floor from the east via a courtyard
or gain access to the first floor over a
300-metre footbridge designed by Brigit
de Kosmi. This pedestrian walkway is an
extension of the city beach and promenade
further east and passes over a canal
before leading into the building. Once inside,
it crosses the FRAC lengthwise in the
form of an interior ‘street’, from where it
is possible to experience the neighbouring
hall in all its dizzying grandeur.

Two kinds of climate, two kinds of spatial
experience
Large, open floors and rooms of different
heights characterise the inside of
the FRAC. On the ground floor, there is
the visitor reception area and a bar designed
by Lang/Baumann artists. The
museum administration offices are on
the second floor. The exhibition rooms
occupy all four levels in the east half of
the new building; in the west half, the
collection depots are accommodated on
three floors. This spatial arrangement
is favourable for visitor routing and for
frequent replacement of the works on
show. Moreover, the different areas are
completely interchangeable as far as
use is concerned. “Mobility and flexibility
are linked to the availability of space
rather than the movability of building
elements”, explain the architects. “If a
lot of space is available, things can take
place simultaneously and interactions
can result. In addition, the rooms allow
different forms of interpretation.”

The useful areas are housed in a skeleton
construction made of prefabricated
concrete parts. In order to adapt the spaces
to the frequently changing exhibitions,
they are equipped with a system of light,
mobile partition walls that the architects
had previously designed for the Palais de
Tokyo in Paris and used again here. On
the outside, a lightweight bio-climatic
envelope that lets in light and air encloses
the solid core of the building. Between
the core and the shell, spacious access areas
are accommodated. Automatic doors
separate the exhibition and office spaces
from this intermediate area, which functions
as a climatic buffer. This means that the public and staff
are always in contact with the outdoor
climate. The employees tend to dress in
multiple thin layers, as museum director
Keren Detton explains. “In this way, we
can simply put on an article of clothing
and then take it off again when we go from
one floor to the next. I like this idea very
much. We are always connected to the
seasons and the weather outside in some
way or another. It is very pleasant when
the body becomes part of a natural cycle
in this way.”

For visual perception too, the access
areas are a double asset. Two parallel
landscapes unfold before the eyes: that
of the sea to the north and that of the
works of art on the exhibition levels.
Flooded with daylight, the intermediate
climate zone provides space not only for
the movement of visitors but also for the
superimposition of worlds of imagination
and chance encounters. Its effect is
based on a very permeable facade made

Client:

Municipalities association
(Communauté Urbaine)
of Dunkirk, FR

Architects:

Anne Lacaton & Jean-Philippe
Vassal, Paris, FR

Location:

A503 Avenue Bancs de Flandres,
Dunkerque, FR

“Movement in these open, spacious rooms encourages people to approach each other and enter into discussions. This applies not only to visitors but also to the entire FRAC team, which works in an open-space office here. People encounter each other and begin to talk because the spacious ness of the rooms allows it.”

Élodie Condette, programme manager

of polycarbonate panels on the lower part of the building and a metal skeleton with a double ETFE membrane on the upper part. The membrane envelope is fitted with automatic openings that are controlled by temperature, wind and moisture sensors. The sensors come from the professional horticulture sector and enable easy control of the intermediate area’s temperature.
The spatial and atmospheric circumstances, of course, influence how the museum is used and also how the rooms connect people or keep them at a distance. “For us, daylight is always a natural component of any concept developed for exhibitions. Do we want to block it out or use it to set the scene? The relationship to light is always present in our work and is subjected to close scrutiny in the positive sense,” declares FRAC’s programme manager Elodie Condette. Likewise, the dimensions and the acoustics of the rooms have an effect on the exhibition concepts and the behaviour of the visitors. “There is a great deal of space on the different levels but the entrances to the exhibition rooms are rather on the small side. This means that the visitors often get into conversations with each other at the entrances and exits of the exhibitions,” says Condette. “The contrast in scale and the ways in which people move around result in relationships of proximity. On the one hand, the visitors are impressed by the size of the rooms; on the other, this closeness reduces their reluctance to approach the museum personnel and ask questions.”
By bringing the landscape and the outdoor climate into the building, the architects created an important framing parameter for the exhibitions. This real, very actual feature precedes all cultural intentions and all spatial situations. It has an enormous influence on how visitors and staff perceive space and on how they communicate with each other. The special spatial atmosphere becomes most noticeable on the top floor of the new building, which serves as a resting area and viewing platform but does not have any predetermined use. Here, the smell of sea spray, a quiet breath of wind and the continually changing daylight of the north are the most important elements of the architecture and the collective space.

An architect by training, Karine Dana works as
a freelance writer and journalist in the press
sector and publishing, and as a film-maker in the field of architecture. She made the first movie devoted to the approach of architects Anne
Lacaton & Jean-Philippe Vassal and Frederic Druot. Her movies can be found at https://vimeo.com/channels/1254948